"You aim at a devout life, dear Philothea, because as a Christian you know that such devotion is most acceptable to God's Divine Majesty," says St. Francis de Sales in his book "Introduction to the Devout Life".
And we can all be Philotheas, as St. Francis notes: "I have made use of a name suitable to all who seek the devout life, Philothea meaning one who loves God."

Pages

Friday, November 29, 2013

NFP and the Feminist Revolution

Following the many interesting
comments on a couple of recent NFP posts (here
and here),
an anonymous friend offered these observations on a few of the comments. I
think he makes some excellent points:

1.
"The widespread, indiscriminate promotion of natural birth regulation will unavoidably contribute to the contraceptive mentality, precisely because of its
emphasis on human control over conception."

Yes, the fact that NFP is part of the contraceptive
mentality is very true, and is so obvious as to be tautological. The
contraceptive mentality is all about the control of birth, not about the
artificiality of the method used to accomplish that end.

2.
"My parents were very keen on NFP and I attribute that fact to the fact
that neither me nor my sister has ever seriously considered family life."

This is very true, but not unique to NFP in comparison to
other methods of birth control. The contraceptive mentality leads to a loss of
interest in sex. Men are no longer men and women are no longer women, and so it
is just like a battery that no longer has a positive pole and a negative pole.
There is no longer any charge, so you can't start your car. There is no
electricity, no life.

A very interesting article that describes the long-term
trend in this regard asks in its headliner questions:

Why
have young people in Japan stopped having sex? What happens to a country when
its young people stop having sex?

The statistics in the article are really startling, even if
you’ve been following this issue for a long time. The gist of the article is
that the Japanese hardly even need birth control any longer, because young men
and women simply have no interest in each other. Perhaps the NFP advocates can
tout this as the ultimate triumph of NFP: no babies being born in the country
using the most natural method of all.

In reality, it is the triumph of Manicheism. Periodic continence was the method of birth
control used by the Manicheans, which
St. Augustine condemned so vigorously. St. Augustine worked to distinguish
between a truly Catholic love of chastity and purity which leads in turn to
fruitful generosity among those who are not called to the celibate religious
life, in comparison to the Manichean hatred of life which leads to the deadly
combination of impurity and sterility – the exact same combination we see in
Japan today: a society awash in pornography which is incapable of having
children.

One might reply, "Well Japan is a strange foreign
country." No, the reality is that Japan is just the most modern country in
the world. Wherever Japan is today, we will be there in 10 - 20 years. We have
followed all their demographic trends, just a few years behind them. The
situation in places like Germany and many other European countries is not much
different from Japan.

3.
"The NFP movement may be part of the feminization of the Church. An NFP marriage necessarily puts the woman in charge."

Yes, now we are getting to the heart of the matter. We are
in the middle of a revolution, the Feminist Revolution. It is just as much of a
revolution as the French Revolution or the Communist Revolution. And just as
violent – in fact much more so since the number of casualties from this
revolution is actually higher than all the wars of all of history put together.
Like all revolutions, the purpose of the revolution is to overturn the natural
order and to make the higher serve the lower.

This revolution has several battle fronts – divorce is one
example – but the main battle is over birth control. This is where the
revolution lives or dies. That is why feminists fight tooth and nail over every
single smallest abortion restriction, even live birth abortion. This is the
battle where they cannot concede any ground.

Catholics who do not use birth control are reactionaries,
whether they like it or not. Catholics with large families are often surprised
and hurt by the reactions they get in the supermarket, because they wonder,
"Why can't they have their small family and be happy about me having a big
family?" But the reality is that anyone having a large family is on the
wrong side of the current revolution, and there is going to be hatred directed
at you.

That is also the reason for the fury directed at Pope Paul
VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae. We
know from reading the document that it is very liberal, and in fact it
overturns much of Catholic teaching on marriage, although it upholds the
teaching on artificial contraception. But the opponents of HV don't care at all
about Catholic doctrine per se, they only care that HV is an obstacle to
the revolution. It was one thing if a small handful of Amish or Orthodox Jews
were not signing up, but the revolution couldn't afford to have hundreds of
millions of Catholics on the other side.

That's where NFP comes in – although strictly as a front, as
the facade of the Potemkin village. The reality is that 98% of Catholics joined
the revolution, but NFP allowed the Church to save face by allowing pastors to
naively pretend that their parish full of small families got that way via
periodic continence. Catholics can participate in the feminist revolution while
pretending that they are still Catholic, just like the "Patriotic
Church" in China allows Chinese Catholics to go along with the Communist
government.

And so it becomes clear that we can never make any progress
on the first "blessing" of marriage, the procreation and
education of children, until we realize how intimately it is connected with the
second "blessing" of marriage, the mutual fidelity of the
spouses, which is based upon the "order of love":

Domestic
society being confirmed, therefore, by this bond of love, there should flourish
in it that "order of love," as St. Augustine calls it. This order
includes both the primacy of the
husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the
Apostle commends in these words: "Let women be subject to their husbands
as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the
head of the Church. (Casti Connubii, emphasis added)

Catholic promoters of NFP are trying to walk a delicate
tight-rope in their claim of adherence to the first blessing of marriage. With
regard to the second blessing of marriage, however, I've never encountered any
NFP proponents who even bother to pay lip service to the “order of love”. Even
traditional Catholic women with large families will argue tooth and nail
against subjection and obedience.

NFP is the method by which women are put in control of the
couple's sex life, even when the couple consider themselves sincere Catholics.
They are brought to participate in the feminist revolution under the cover of
pietistic talk about "respect" and so forth.

NFP is similar to what I say about EWTN. The devil tells
himself, "I already have 99% of the people hooked up to my control box,
but there are still that remaining 1% of pious Catholics who are not watching
television. What can I do? I know, I will have a channel dedicated to pious
Catholics. Then that last 1% will sign up for television, and although they
might watch a few minutes of EWTN now and then, that will do no harm, and in
the meantime they will join the rest of my brainwashed servants."

NFP is like that in the area of birth control. The devil
already had 99% of Catholics signed up for artificial birth control, but he
still wanted to get that last 1% to participate in the revolution. By getting
them to sign up for NFP, he knows that they are now part of the contraceptive
mentality, whether or not they have a few children more or less, and the women
are now in control of their families.

This subject is too involved for a long disquisition right
now, but it is important to realize that this subjection and obedience is not
merely a question of who makes the final decision when the couple can't decide
whether or not to buy a new car, but rather it is the very foundation of
everything in the spiritual life. There is no grace, no interior reality, no
true love without subjection and obedience.

Yes, “responsible
parenthood” is simply a Catholic version of "Planned Parenthood" – no
more, no less. I own a book published in
the early sixties in which Catholic theologians “reconsider” Church teaching on
birth control. The book was sponsored and published by Planned Parenthood. Many
of the theologians are Jesuits. The Introduction was written by Cardinal
Cushing of Boston. So here we have evidence of an active collaboration between
Planned Parenthood and Catholics who were working to redefine Catholic teaching
at the time when “responsible parenthood” became the new rallying cry – of the
Majority Report of the Papal Commission on Birth Control, for example. And so
it remains today.

10 comments:

Everyone should read the Guardian article because it describes what is already here in the USA. It is not coming in a decade or even a few years; it is here and has been for decades.

When I was in college in the late 70s/early 80s, the majority of women I encountered were more interested in a career than creating a family. And when I did get married, my wife almost immediately regretted the decision because she realized that she had little interest in having children. Society has ingrained in so many women (and society in general) that motherhood is slavery by the evil oppressive violent male; only losers/slackers become mothers unless they deposit the newborns ASAP into daycare and return to the workplace.

Western Christianity and RC-ism ignored the situation (or merely paid lip service) and are now reaping the "fruits." If we are fortunate, it will only take a few generations to reverse this mess.

On the other hand, what is more likely is that some sort of catastrophe will occur as a result of the misguided aversion to children and family; a remnant will survive and begin again.

To be a radical today, is to have a large FAMILY. (I almost wrote "to have many children" but the welfare queens know that that the number of children does not necessarily equate to family.)

I was going to write about how I admire large families but can't seem to work up the desire for marriage and family as I had your typical middle class upbringing in a small suburban NFP family but others have expressed themselves better on this than I.

Instead, I wonder if you can tie Feminist NFP thinking to the new liturgy. We all know that most people receive communion from a laywoman and in a way, that violates the intimate and exclusive relationship that priests used to have with the body of Christ. But, I'm talking about something more basic.

Both the Eucharist and Marriage are sacraments. In the Novus Ordo, people seem more narcissistic and they talk about things too openly. It is hard to imagine the Mass of Paul VI prior to the invention of the microphone and versus populum feeds everyone's ego. The TOB folks take things even further by linking the sacrifice of the Mass to intercourse and Theology of the BODY is actually anthropocentric when theology is supposed to be oriented to God; not ourselves, much less just our bodies.

Contrast what I've said with the Extraordinary Form. Better yet, consider some of the Eastern Rites where the very act of consecration takes place behind an iconostasis.

For all the talk about how NFP opens the doors of communication, if you were to survey my drinking buddies, you'd find that the wives pretty much take care of this and they are either studs or boy toys depending on their perspectives. Contraceptives may make women available to men all the time but NFP has the woman ALWAYS taking the initiative and men better be ready. When women are fertile, they sleep on the couch. Men are not allowed to understand women. Sounds like feminism to me.

I was first exposed TOB when I was in CCD. Lots of giggling at the opportunity to talk about intimacy down to the mechanics but not very good prep for the sacrament of confirmation. Later, at Stubie, I got a second dose along with NFP. I'm not making any judgements nor am I questioning whether or not it lead others to sanctity, but for me, it always smelled of gnosticism.

Maureen, NFP is rather notoriously "pushed" by the USCCB. But why should it be included in marriage prep if it's only for use when there are "serious" reasons?

The parts of Theology of the Body that reflect the traditions and teachings of the Church are part of the deposit of the faith, as I understand it. But there are parts of TOB that are novel and do not reflect the Church's traditional teaching on marriage, and those parts cannot become part of the deposit of the faith. And since the TOB "experts" tell us that TOB is "dense" and difficult to "unpack", there may certainly be things in there that don't fit the bill.

Darren, with all due respect, it seems that "all objections to NFP" have NOT been answered; your saying that they have does not make it so.

I'm moving on, all right - with a new book to address the concerns held by those who sense that there is something not-quite-Catholic about the NFP mentality or lifestyle. I hope to have it done and published in January 2014.

Custom-made Altar Antependia

Click the photo and visit the page for information on purchasing altar antependia.

Translate

Catholic Contraception?

Despite the defensiveness of the promoters, the occasional critic does speak against NFP. And if one looks carefully at what the critics say, there is much to be considered. Michael Malone's book exposes many logical fallacies in the arguments of NFP promoters, and asks critical questions that, to my knowledge, NFP promoters cannot and have not answered.

My NFP book is now available!

This is a compilation of my blog posts on NFP, along with some extra commentary and explanation. Click on the image to go to Amazon and see the full description. Available on Kindle, too.

Zeal For Thy House is available!

This is a compilation of my posts on the liturgy - liturgical abuse, music in the liturgy, the Novus Ordo, and the Traditional Latin Mass. "Glimmers of Hope" are also included to show that progress IS being made! Click on the image to order at Amazon. It's available on Kindle, too.

Contact Me

Follow by Email

Followers

Total Pageviews

About Me

My husband and I live in Baker City, Oregon. I care deeply about the liturgy, and pray ardently for the "reform of the reform". I think we've strayed far from our Catholic identity over the last 50 years, and we need to return to the traditional teachings of the Church in order to regain lost ground.